Trump’s Civil Servant Purge Has Already Begun ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Corruption’s gonna be partying like it’s 1879!
Well, great. The AP reports that incoming senior Trump administration officials have already begun thoughtcrime-interrogating career civil servants who work on the White House National Security Council about who they voted for in the 2024 election, their political contributions, and if they’ve made social media posts that would be considered “incriminating,” AKA insufficiently suck-uppy by the President-elect’s team of suckups. Yep, the corruption is fixing to be balls-out this time. And sure is alarming that his first priority is making sure that there’s nobody who might speak out about national security issues! Whatever quos is this fucker planning to quid pro that we can’t even imagine yet? It’s going to be a pile taller than Trump Tower Saudi Arabia!
This is all very NOT NORMAL, unless you are Mao. And sure isn’t good for national security to trade people with experience who will give national security advice for ones that prioritize telling the Lord Emperor what he wants to hear! But only the security of his own flabby haunches matters to him, of course.
Trump’s apparently still ass-scorched by whistleblowers from his first term, namely the Vindman twins, Alexander and Eugene, who spoke up when Trump asked the Ukrainian President to Do Him A Favor, Though, and dig up, or make up, some dirt on the Bidens. It led to Trump’s second first impeachment, and Trump fired Alexander from the NSC, and he’s still mighty bitter about the whole thing.
And the Heritage Foundation has been leg-humping-wild to get Christian conservatives appointed to government positions, so that they can break the whole government and replace it with some kind of conservative Christian entity that exists only to check everybody’s mail for abortion pills and imprison trans people for existing. They’ve been busy-beaver digging through employees’ communications and filing tens of thousands of FOIA requests, to compose a mighty enemies list of any federal employees who used terms like “climate change” or “ACLU,” or said anything not-negative about gay people or DEI. Heritage claims to already have a list of 20,000 candidates with little heart-shaped pupils for Trump that they’ve been working on for at least two years, all ready to be plugged in to get paid taxpayer dollars to worship him, hand-selected by Trump’s previous White House purity tester (and porn-peener-payoff-check-hider) Johnny McEntee.
When it comes to the NSC this time around, NSC advisor Trump has picked a ham-headed Florida man, Rep. Mike Waltz, to do his bidding, and he is already perky as punch at the prospect of getting rid of all nonpolitical appointees and career intelligence officials serving on the NSC, bragging to Breitbart: “everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20.” Yep, national security concern number one is to make sure nobody will be there to whistleblow whatever illegal or immoral things Big Boss Baby might get himself into.
The less-bad news is, because of federal employee protections, Trump can’t just up-and-fire thousands people in non-political positions on day one. But many of the NSC employees are loaners from the the State Department, FBI and CIA, so there’s nothing preventing them from being sent packing back to their original agencies.
Still, Project 2025, and Trump’s Agenda 47, aspires to get rid of ALL the disloyal civil servants everywhere, which is quite a task given that there’s more than two million of them.
Talking to the New York Times back in January, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, the creep who looks like God got interrupted while creating Stephen Miller and forgot to finish, was very excited about it.
“People will lose their jobs. [...] Buildings will be shut down. [...] We’re talking about destroying political power. And they have political power. And they wield it. They absolutely wield that over the appointees of the president of the United States, whom the American people elected. And for conservatives, one of our greatest frustrations is that thousands of times in the last decades, they have blocked conservative innovation. So we want them out of there. We want Schedule F.”
But, they do not have it yet. In October of 2020, in the final weeks of his last term, Trump executive-ordered Schedule F, a new classification for potentially about 50,000 civil service employees, or more, making them easier to fire. But the order was immediately repealed by Biden, who also added more federal employee protections and rules to make it harder to re-classify employees and mass-fire them. So Trump will have to go back to Congress to get permission to re-classify all of these employees, and the employees can appeal, and none of that will be fast, nor is it an automatic given that even hardline GOP’ers aren’t on board with it. Explained an official to the Federal Times:
If another administration were to disagree with the policies that are reflected in this regulation, first, they would have to follow that full rulemaking process themselves. Then in that rulemaking, among other things, they would have to explain how a different rule would be better than the carefully crafted balance that OPM has struck here, and how their interpretation would be consistent with over 140 years of statutory language and congressional intent. Needless to say, that is no small task.
And there’s laws that limit the number of Senior Executive Service employees who can be “non-career.”
Frontline civil servants are exempt from political firings for good reason! Mass firings would destabilize agencies every four years, and bring back a corrupt-by-definition “patronage” or “spoils” system where political parties could give away jobs as rewards for support, as opposed to jobs being given for merit. Trump heaven! The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 and the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 both aimed to get rid of patronage, based on the notion that civil servants should serve the public, and not the whims of some whiny-baby president who wants to fire anybody whose Facebook page is not filled with AI images of a ripped Trump rescuing a kitten from a flood.
But corruption and whims is what old Donya is all about! And affirmative action for loyalists is job one. Maybe someday he will get his dream of having train derailments be handled by a white guy repeating that DEI wrecked the train instead of the NTSB, but to start he’ll have to contend with smaller purges where he can.
[AP/ Axios archive link/ The Federal Times]
So this is what is going to get the price of eggs down?
Having civil servants who can expect to be canned after the next election is an absolute recipe for corruption. This has been amply demonstrated for centuries all over the world.